Ancient Roman city buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD, located in southern Italy. It is one of the world's most important archaeological sites and among the most visited.
When Vesuvius erupted, it sent a cloud of ash 32km into the sky. The locals did not know Vesuvius was a volcano; the Romans had no word for "volcano". What fell on Pompeii was not lava but pumice stones, light enough that residents, as Pliny the Younger observed from a nearby villa, "tied pillows over their heads for protection". The stones fell at a rate of 15cm an hour: knee-height in three hours, toddler-height in six. Perhaps 90% of the population escaped. Those who sheltered became trapped as walls collapsed under the weight. The volcanic cloud then collapsed and a wave of superheated pumice, gas and ash—travelling at 100kph and temperatures exceeding 200 degrees Celsius—raced down the slope. In Pompeii, people suffocated. In nearby Herculaneum, people's brains boiled.
Excavations began roughly three centuries ago. The site has been used as a stone quarry, plundered by the Bourbons (who cut holes through walls to extract treasures), and targeted by Napoleon's sister Caroline, who planned to uncover it all in three years. The infamous statue of a god having sex with a goat was unearthed in 1752.
One-third of Pompeii remains unexcavated. The largest dig in 70 years began in 2023, funded by EU money, under the direction of Gabriel Zuchtriegel. Some 3,200 square metres have been uncovered, yielding three houses, a bathhouse, a fresco that looks so like a pizza that archaeologists call it the "not-pizza" fresco, five human skeletons and numerous phalluses.
The grains of pumice that buried the city are so light and dry that they preserved everything they fell on. Archaeologists describe them as "Amazon packaging material". The challenge is not extraction but keeping structures upright once the supporting pumice is removed—a shattered column or wall mid-fall can be wholly held up by pumice.
Daily visits have been capped at 20,000, down from 36,000. Millions visit each year. The site's art appears on fridge magnets and its mosaics have been made into doormats.
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